Blizzard builders will most actually bend over backwards when explaining her lore to justify Shion’s bodily humanization as an alternative of admitting they’re copy-and-pasting the identical components for every new feminine character they launch. The newest girls added to Overwatch’s lineup incessantly share related traits; symmetrical faces, athletic builds, and hyper-feminine options, with a few of these characters getting slapped with frequent East Asian cultural motifs with out a lot thought.
Anran, the 22-year-old graduate of Wuxing College’s Fireplace School, makes use of a flaming fan to scorch her enemies. Kiriko, the 21-year-old medic from Japan, is outlined visually by her guardian fox spirit. Sierra, a 25-year-old soldier from Colorado and the latest hero earlier than Shion, bursts onto the battlefield with heavy winged eyeliner, lipgloss, and numerous technological instruments of conflict (a giant gun, a drone, and so forth.).
Followers aren’t blind to this components, both. Posters on Reddit summarize this pattern succinctly. As one consumer places it: “The character sheet at blizzard: Girl, enticing, younger, Japanese, cyberpunk, anime. Yeah, that appears like cash proper right here.”
These are only a few examples of the epidemic of Overwatch’s girls being restricted to a really particular area of interest, one which falls far wanting the unique Overwatch lineup’s ingenuity. Shion, as a female-presenting robotic character with a transparent purpose to separate from these options, might have been the Overwatch developer’s likelihood to hit a feminine design out of the park after a collection of swings-and-misses, however is as an alternative one other disappointing addition.
Different Omnic characters have managed to face out visually with out adopting human options. Ramattra, the latest Omnic addition to Overwatch’s lineup, has a menacing look with cohesive, lore-appropriate options and aesthetic. The distinction between Ramattra and Shion that allowed him to not fall into the formulaic character design Overwatch is now notorious for is that reality that he’s a person.
By including yet one more standardly attractive girl character to the roster, Overwatch builders are telling their followers they care about creating conventionally enticing girls over considerate characterization. Shion is simply one other unlucky sufferer of their long-running conflict in opposition to inventive experimentation in relation to feminine characters.
